Captain Lawrence Brewing Co.
As a homebrewer in high school, Scott Vaccaro had a fascination with wood-aged beers and looked to American-brewing pioneers New Glarus Brewing, Russian River Brewing Co., and New Belgium Brewing Co. Now that he has a brewery of his own, he’s searching for ways to bring new flavors from a barrel and inspiring a new generation of brewers along the way.
SCOTT VACCARO SEES HIS BREWERY, Captain Lawrence, filling four buckets: the mainstays, the pilot batches, sours, and “IPAS just like everyone else.” His career is only entering its second professional decade but he’s seen enough and been on the front lines of too many battles to rest on his laurels or dedicate himself to just one or two main pursuits. While the majority of the beers run off a 40-barrel brewdeck at the Elmsford, New York, brewery, Vaccaro and his team spend most of their time experimenting on a 7-barrel pilot system. “Last year we did ninety different beers on the pilot—all were served right in our tasting room, and very few recipes were repeated,” he said. A lot of these beers have helped continue to evolve the oak-aging program that put this Westchester County brewery on the map shortly after it opened in 2006. It also helped that the following year he took gold in the American-style Sour Ale or German-style Sour Ale category at the Great American Beer Festival for Cuvee de Castleton. The brewery would follow up with seven more medals over the next several years.
Playing with Evolution
The beer the brewery is likely best known for is Rosso e Marrone, a sour ale. It started out as St. Vincent, a dubbel the brewery makes, and Vaccaro wanted to see what would happen to it in a barrel and pitched with Brettanomyces. “It tasted even better,” he says, “so we dumped in grapes. There was thought behind it, but it wasn’t something we monitored every step of the way.” After it won a gold medal in 2009, it was closely monitored and the recipe was refined. First up was moving away from the house culture they had been using and settling on a blended strain of Lactobacillus and Brettanomyces and settling on one variety of grape. But perhaps the biggest evolutionary step was moving away from multiple barrels and moving fermentation to foeders.
“When we were using 55-gallon barrels, there was variability,” Vaccaro says. Now with nine 1,400–1,800gallon foeders, there’s much more control (and a large manway on top also makes adding the grapes a lot easier than stuffing them through the bung.) Those barrels were one of his main concerns at his original brewery, a 20-barrel brewhouse in nearby Pleasantville. The wood program was a hodgepodge, where the upward of 300 barrels he was using were different sizes or different origins, and each day brought the possibility of a blown bung and lost beer. The brewery upgraded when it moved to its new 25,000-square-foot facility and in addition to the foeders added four 600-gallon Italian rounds and about 150 65-gallon wine barrels that allow for continuity.
That’s not to say there aren’t still pitfalls. One of the biggest things he’s learned from his oak program is trusting his gut and paying attention to the beer. “The worst thing is not always admitting when
Vaccaro and his brewers are trying to find something “new and exciting,” including what he’s calling “sessionable sours”—barrel-aged, not kettle-soured, beers that have added characteristics and aren’t just sour for the sake of being sour. “I don’t want to make something that will rip your throat out,” he says.
it’s ready and thinking that it’ll get better because when you go back later is when you realize that it’s past the point of no return and it’s no longer drinkable. You can’t blend out the bad.”
It goes the other way, too. He never wants to pull a beer too early. “I’ve lost beers that could have been fabulous and flavorful by not watching time,” he says. They’ve also under fruited and over fruited. “When it’s gone, it’s gone, and we still dump a good amount down the drain.” He’s also misjudged how consumers will perceive a beer, notably when the brewery made a batch with cherries, but used a variety with white flesh. It smelled great and tasted great, too, he says, with two pounds of fruit per barrel, but it didn’t look like a cherry beer—there was no red hue—and it just “confused the shit out of them.” It was a fine beer for the tasting room, but one that could never go out to a larger market where each drinker couldn’t receive a proper explanation.
Bucking a Trend
At bottle shares around the tri-state area, certain bottles of Captain Lawrence beer will get wide-eyed attention—this includes the above-mentioned beers and others such as Golden Delicious. What some might find surprising, however, is that to secure many of these offerings—so long as they are in season—you just need to visit the brewery on days when it’s open to the public.
“We used to have release days, back when we were making a lot less,” Vaccaro says. Beers would sell out in an hour, but with all the people turning up, those would turn into disasters with cops showing up, neighbors complaining, and landlords being furious. Now, with the new location, complete with a sprawling beer garden, “people can buy ten different sours depending on the time of the year. You don’t have to hunt for the stuff; just come visit and buy it,” he says. Today the beers don’t sell out in an hour, but over weeks or months. Plus, there’s something cool about being able to walk into a brewery and find a gold medal– winning sour on the shelf.
To be clear, Vaccaro doesn’t fault breweries that do regular releases that bring hundreds of people to a parking lot each weekend, as that can be fun and a great business model, but it’s just not for him. It’s the same reason he doesn’t do a bottle club. When it comes to making a beer, “you always have to assume there will be some loss, and we can’t count bottles until they are bottles. That would keep me up at night, worrying that something would go wrong and we couldn’t get a promised beer to people.”
Curve of a Career
Vaccaro is not unlike other pro brewers— he was introduced to homebrewing while still in high school. Visiting a friend’s house one afternoon, he encountered the friend’s father making beer on the stovetop and asked to be taught. His education continued at the University of California at Davis where he received his degree in fermentation science and would go on to work for Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. He’d eventually head back East where he worked for two now-closed breweries in Connecticut before opening his own place. While he might not spend as much time as he once did standing on the brew deck brewing mainstay beers such as a Kölsch, a variety of lagers, pale ales, and IPAS, he does get his turns at the pilot systems.
There he and his brewers are trying to find something “new and exciting,” including what he’s calling “sessionable sours”—barrel-aged, not kettle-soured, beers that are dry hopped, spiced, or have added characteristics that aren’t just sour for the sake of being sour. “I don’t want to make something that will rip your throat out,” he says. The trend now with some sour beers is akin to the IBU wars from several years back where brewers wanted to one-up their contemporaries with bitterness. Thankfully that has leveled off, and he thinks the same will happen with sours. What will emerge are beers that will hopefully inspire a new generation of drinkers, in the way he was inspired by the early American pioneers.
“There’s a circle, and that’s how flavors evolve—you get inspired and then hopefully inspire. The flavors you leave behind will hopefully influence others, and in a good way.”